ABSTRACT
In late 1989, Poland's Solidarity( Solidarność )-Led government took charge of a deteriorating economy and opted for a radical programme of neoliberal market reform. In many ways, this programme belied Solidarity's political values and thereby inexorably shaped the movement's post-communist political identity. This essay will argue that ‘shock therapy’ in Poland was facilitated by exogenous elites and institutions whose neoliberal ideas clashed with Solidarity's original bottom-up approach to social and political change. This, in turn, prompted the Solidarity movement to redefine its identity in the post-communist period. It did so by reneging on its previous commitment to build a civil society based on social justice, worker selfmanagement and bottom-up labour activism, and instead identified itself as a rightwing advocate of free market economics.
